Elections Commission, meet the City Clerk’s office

City officials say most municipalities operate these two operations under one office, and this is simply a means of creating better efficiencies in City Hall.

Adoption of such a proposal is likely to be part of the upcoming budget discussions for 2014. In the meantime City Clerk David Olson has been nominated to fill the position of interim executive secretary of the Elections Commission. Think of it as a dress rehearsal.

This is a great idea and makes perfect sense. I have written on this blog many times about the need to consolidate and streamline City Departments. We need to go further and reduce the size of the Board of Aldermen and merge HR functions between the Municipal and Schools.

This makes me uneasy. Out of all the cities in Massachusetts larger than Newton, only three have merged Clerk/Elections departments: Worcester, Quincy, and Lynn. I’m not saying that these municipalities have flawed systems, but I do want to point out that when the administration says that most municipalities operate under this system, they mean most cities and towns smaller than Newton.

Staffing levels in the EC are already down, and consolidating the department with potential further cuts may only hurt the integrity of elections in Newton for the future. David Olson is a great guy, that’s true, but I don’t really understand his comments about the ebbs and flows of busy times for the Clerk’s office versus the EC’s office: what about Newton right now, looking at as many as three different special elections in a three or four month period, followed by the regularly scheduled election cycle in September/November. How does that fit into the dynamic of ‘when one is busy, the other is not’?

My point is, I don’t know if it’s smart to put so much on the shoulders of one department, unless staffing levels in that newly merged department are raised — which, one might argue, defeats the purpose of merging the departments to begin with, if the intent was to save money.

It’s a pretty vague unease, I know, and I don’t have anything concrete to base it on — again, the three large municipalities that use merged systems work just fine — but for me, I’d rather see a separation of departments in this instance, not a merger. Elections are just too important to risk being mishandled for the sake of saving some money.

@Paul- No need for you to stress about the merge. Worcester combined their departments several years ago and things are working fine. The City of Waltham also runs just fine with a combined department.

Like I said, I don’t think the combined Clerk/EC model is a flawed one, but I would feel better if I knew exactly how the responsibilities of the Elections department will be taken on by the Clerk’s office. The implication I’m driving at here is, election administration is a difficult, intricate part of government, and trying to shoehorn more responsibility into a department, without adequately staffing that department to make up for the new workload, could lead to things falling through the cracks. Especially when it comes to elections, things falling through the cracks makes me uneasy.

Now, this could all be a moot point, if the combined Clerk/EC has staffing levels that can ensure the workload is handled. I’m looking forward to learning more about this.